The Art of Suo Moto by Chief Justices of Supreme Court Pakistan

Society Pakistan & World Affairs
1

I can name at least two judges 1. Chief Justice Ch. Iftekhar Ahmad 2. Chief Justice Saqib Nisar (I give a dam fame). In their tenure mostly they wasted their times in taking up irrelevant Suo Moto cases, none aimed at improving the judiciary system. The recent Transparency International report indicated that top two corrupt institutions of Pakistan are 1. Police 2. Judiciary Instead of poking noses in the affairs of others why not these judges just improve their image and do something that people can have some faith and confidence in their own judiciary system. I think it is high time that current Chief Justice should take Suo Moto and look why TI had come up to such an horrible conclusion?

Police and judiciary most corrupt institutions, says TI Pakistan

A vast majority (85.9%) of people consider the federal government’s self-accountability to be unsatisfactory

By Ansar Abbasi
December 08, 2021
https://www.thenews.com.pk/assets/uploads/akhbar/2021-12-08/915055_7085878_TIcorruption2_akhbar.jpg
Illustrations The News

ISLAMABAD: The National Corruption Perception Survey 2021 conducted by Transparency International Pakistan finds the police and judiciary the most corrupt institutions in the country.

The survey, released on Wednesday at 1:00 am, also reveals that the vast majority of people consider the federal government’s self-accountability to be unsatisfactory. According to the survey, the three most important causes of corruption are weak accountability (51.9%), the greed of powerful people (29.3%) and low salaries (18.8%).

According to a TI Pakistan press release, the TI has conducted National Corruption Perception Surveys five times in the last 20 years: NCPS 2002, NCPS 2006, NCPS 2009, NCPS 2010 and 2011. In 2021, TI Pakistan conducted the National Corruption Perception Survey 2021 in all four provinces. The survey was conducted from October 14, 2021, to October 27, 2021. The survey reflects the perception of the general public on very important governance issues.
https://www.thenews.com.pk/assets/uploads/akhbar/2021-12-08/915055_179102_TIcorruption_akhbar.jpg

As per the TI Pakistan announcement, the following are the key findings of the latest report:

  1. The National Corruption Perception Survey 2021 has revealed that police remain the most corrupt sector, the judiciary was seen as second most corrupt, tendering and contracting the third most corrupt while health has climbed to become the fourth most corrupt since the last NCPS 2011. According to the Judicial Statistics of Pakistan 2020 report by the National Judicial (Policy Making) Committee, there are 46,698 cases pending in the Supreme Court and 1,772,990 cases pending in the District Judiciary.
  2. A vast majority (85.9%) of people consider the federal government’s self-accountability to be unsatisfactory.
  3. Pakistanis continued to believe that the corruption in the government sector is high. The police (41.4%), judiciary (17.4%) and contracting/tendering (10.3%) are the three most corrupt sectors according to the survey, while contracts of roads (59.8%), cleanliness and garbage collection (13.8%), access to water (13.3%) and the drainage system (13.1%) are top the list of public services for which people have to pay bribes to get access to.
  4. The three most important causes of corruption, according to the NCPS 2021, are weak accountability (51.9%), the greed of powerful people (29.3%) and low salaries (18.8%).
  5. As measures to reduce corruption, 40.1% of Pakistanis say an increase in/stringent punishments for corruption cases, 34.6% Pakistanis say accountability of public officers by expediting NAB’s handling of corruption cases, and 25.3% say a complete ban on those convicted of corruption from holding public office, are key to combat corruption in Pakistan.
  6. The survey also sheds light on local governments and how their presence could have helped Pakistan establish a firmer grip on the situation arising out of Covid-19.
  7. A large number (47.8%) of Pakistanis consider that if local government elected representatives were in place, Covid-19 public awareness campaigns could have been launched in a more effective manner.
  8. A large proportion of Pakistanis (72.8%) believe that public sector corruption at the grassroots levels has increased due to the absence of local government.
  9. A total of 89.1% of Pakistanis say that they did not pay any bribe to any government official during the federal government’s Covid-19 relief efforts for deserving citizens.
  10. A significant proportion of the population (81.4%) has denied that it willingly pays bribes and instead there was a clear perception that bribes are extorted from the public through tactics such as inaction or delay in the provision of public services.
  11. Compared to the three most recent federal governments, the majority of Pakistanis (92.9%) consider inflation and the price hike to be the highest during the current PTI government (2018-2021), compared to 4.6 % who thought the same for the PML-N government (2013-2018) and 2.5% of the PPP government (2008-2013).
  12. This coincides with 85.9% Pakistanis who say that their income levels have been squeezed and have decreased during the last three years.
  13. The main reasons citizens blame for rising inflation and unemployment are: government incompetence (50.6%), corruption (23.3%), undue Interference of politicians in government affairs (9.6%) and lack of implementation of policies (16.6%).
  14. The majority of Pakistanis (66.8%) believes that the present government’s accountability drive is partial.

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2

There are many things that ail Pakistan, and corruption is just one of them. There is so much out-of-whack that corruption at times seems like a “solution” when it comes to getting legit work done efficiently. For example, I had the misfortune of getting a phone cleared by customs and PTA last year. Nobody asked me for any bribe, but I had to spend so much time, money and energy on going from office-to-office that I would have willingly paid bribe on top of taxes if someone would have saved me from that.

Anyway, Mazhar Abbas has shared some more information about the murder(assassination?) of Murtaza Bhutto. Najeeb was also murdered in the same tenure of BB. Like countless other high profile murder cases, these two cases will forever remain inconclusive.

3

Please open new thread on these horrible murders. Don’t derail this thread. If judges haven’t be so corrupt in Pakistan you wouldn’t have faced any difficulty in getting your legal things done without any difficulty. When murders, rapes, robberies, murders by agencies (like you mentioned above), etc. get clear chits from these judges, you can imagine what is the status of this unfortunate half Pakistan left once founded by Quaid-e-Azam in 1947.

4

I think judiciary has many good people and they try to improve things. Their efforts push judiciary one step forward, but the vested interest pushes the progress 2 steps back. I attended a joint awards ceremony few years ago of a law college in Sindh and I was amazed to see the quality of lawyers and judges who were in attendance there. 70% of the crowd was typical of what one would expect at such gatherings, but the rest was truly promising. I know first hand how terrible the actual working of our courts is. For example, it took 22 years for courts to decide in favor of a house owner in Islamabad who wanted to get an electricity transformer removed from front of his home.

Not only extreme delays, but some judgements themselves are so out-of-whack that at times I have hoped for a Taliban-style court. Several years ago my car was snatched at gun point. The police found the car within 2 weeks and impounded it. Some other crime was committed by the dacoits using the car before abandoning it. The court ordered the car to remain impounded as it was a piece of evidence in the other case. I visited police station every few days to check on the car that it’s parts are not stolen by the police. Long story short, it took a long time and lots of money was spent to get the car back. And we were not allowed to sell that car for several more years on top of that. My family had to go through all that trouble over no fault of ours in the name of procedure.

When Nawaz Sharif’s disqualification happened so quickly, those who know how judiciary works knew very well that something was not right. And now we know that indeed it was not. Having said all that, I think judicial activism or Suo Moto practices should be minimal in a system like ours. Instead judiciary needs to put its own house in order.

5

The correction should start from the top. Even the case of NS was mishandled by the top judges. He should have been punished in obvious money laundering case and purchase of Avenfield Apartments and other billions of $s foreign properties. But he was punished in a very vague and unrelated case which had nothing to do with the corruption. Unless top court in Pakistan does not become independent, brave and take decisions even in the cases of corrupt generals, the judiciary will remain as one of the most corrupt, coward and biased institution 1947.

6

In theory that certainly makes sense, but in practice that does not happen. There are several reasons for that such as:

1- I’ve often seen that those who want to make a big change at the top have illicit vested interests and couldn’t care less about the masses. Those changes not only failed to deliver anything to the masses but instead made lives of the masses far more miserable. For example, replacing Saddam Hussain with a very “clean” person in Iraq, replacing Mullah Umar with “clean” Karzai and subsequently even “cleaner” professor of Columbia and John Hopkins Ashraf Ghani, replacing Muammar Gaddafi with “clean” US citizen Field Marshal Khalifa Belqasim Haftar, and the chant of “Asad must go!”.

2- I’m not against changes at the top in Pakistan as long as they happen according to the written law. But reaching consensus to do that as required by the written law is far more difficult than doing changes on lower levels, which directly improve lives of the masses. For example, now a days there is a dead lock for the appointment of 5 new judges in the Supreme Court. Whoever from within the candidates gets appointed at the end of the deadlock, it won’t make any immediate improvement in the lives of the masses.

In NYC there used to be lot of crime till the 1990s. So much so that people used to keep money in pockets just to give it to robbers when going out at night because the robbers used to harm people who didn’t had any money on them. The reason for the lawlessness was that police focused all its resources to get the top guys, whom the police always failed to keep in jail for long due to lack of evidence. Then a new strategy was adopted, known as Broken Windows. Instead of going after the top guys, police started issuing fines, and in case of unpaid fines, doing arrests on minor violations such as parking, traffic, transit fares, and so on. Within weeks people felt real improvement in their lives. Once the low-level criminals were taken off the streets, the top-level criminals automatically became handicapped as the top-level criminals used to rely on the lower-level criminals to keep their own hands clean.

I think in Pakistan, real and immediate improvement in people’s lives should dictate policy. I know some people who just refuse to rent out their empty homes because they have been bitten so bad in the past that they do not want to risk it again. If every tenant in Pakistan knows that the owner can evict the tenant within months according to the terms agreed in the rental contract and the owner knows that he will be responsible for fulfilling his end of the agreement, lives of masses will immediately improve. More importantly, finding consensus will be so much easier than on issues that are in the headlines.

7

I remember the times when i was a fan of Iftikhar chaudhry's suo muto notices but boy was I way wrong! Its like these judges dont even know their boundries, they just are power hungry clerks

8

When he was after asses of PPP, I immediately understood that the guy was not what he supposed to project himself. Though the fact a PPP stalwart Aitezaz Ahsan was the one who got him reinstated as CJP leading a lawyers’ movement against General Musharraf. However Chaudhary did not know Zardari well then when he got his son Arsalan involved in a scandal of fuck!#ng foreign whores in a foreign country paid by Malik Riaz :D. Coming back to the topic, when will generals give free hand to democracy and judges to perform their duties independently according to constitution? It is said that Imran Khan could not perform because of the following fact now disclosed by him.

Responsibility was mine, actual rule was someone else’s: Imran on his time as prime minister (Dawn 10-12-2022)

​PTI Chairman Imran Khan on Wednesday said that while running the country was supposed to be his responsibility during his time as the prime minister, the actual rule was of “someone else”.

Imran, who has claimed before as well that he did not have complete liberty to run the country, did not clarify who he was referring to.

The former prime minister made the latest claim in an interaction with journalists in Lahore.

He further said that if “even half the power would have been given” to him in his three and a half years in power, his government would have competed with the performance of Sher Shah Suri — the famed founder of the Sur Empire.

It is not the first time the PTI chief has insinuated that his government was not at liberty to call all the shots.

In an interview in June with anchorperson Sami Ibrahim for Bol News programme Tajzia, the former prime minister had admitted he did not enjoy absolute power, indicating that the actual centres of power in the country lay elsewhere and “everyone knows where that is.”

In the interview, Imran was asked to recall the events of the night of the no-confidence vote against him, who was issuing orders and who had impeded the cases against the PPP and PML-N leaders.

Imran said his government had been “weak” when it came to power and had to seek coalition partners, adding that if the same situation were to arise again, he would opt for reelections and seek a majority government or none at all.

“Our hands were tied. We were blackmailed from everywhere. Power wasn’t with us. Everyone knows where the power lies in Pakistan so we had to rely on them,” he said without elaborating any further on who he was referring to.

“We relied on them all the time. They did a lot of good things too but they didn’t do many things that should’ve been done. They have the power because they control institutions such as NAB (National Accountability Bureau), which wasn’t in our control.”

He claimed that while his government had the responsibility, it did not have all the power and authority.

“No management works if I have responsibility but have no complete power and authority. A system works only when responsibility and authority are in one place.”

Imran said it was imperative for the country to have a “strong army” due to the threat posed by the enemies but said there was also the need to strike a “balance” between having a strong army and a strong government.
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9

^^^ IK is lying. The kind of support establishment gave to IK is unprecedented for any other civilian setup. Project IK was meant to keep IK in power for at least 10 years, but IK still proved too incompetent to keep.

IK had put all the top opposition leadership in jail with the help of establishment. Anyone who created problems for IK, such as Jahangir Tarin and Aleem Khan, were messed up with cases not only against them but also against their family members, including female family members.

IK is not anti-establishment. When he was given a chance, he proved to be super loyal by giving countless top jobs to military men and whole of PTI defended those decisions, hence destroying those institutions:

Here is Raza Rabbani asking about 15 government departments:

Years ago I watched a movie of a retarded but very cruel serial killer. Toward the climax, when he got shot and realized that he himself could be killed. He started making the same pleas which his victims used to make. For a moment those desperate pleas started having an impact but it was quickly realized that he was merely repeating memorized pleas of his victims. Hence was killed. Upon hearing IK making the same complaints, that genuine politicians who became his target used to make, reminds me of that scene.

10

^ Re IK's recent claim, One thing that we all, whether with political favorites or no, should ask that why these political figures go mum as long as they are in power. Yea clearly men in agencies/uniforms dictate them and run most of the show but why do you come in senses only when you are kicked out of power?

11

Very well said. I think PML(N) also played the same trick in past perhaps to black mail the army and get favorable decisions. None has balls to challenge the authority of interference of top generals when in power. However what Aitezaz Ahsan said publicly accusing General Bajwa for giving relief to Sharifs, has committed big crime by CAOS. Isn’t it is high time for Supreme Court to take suo moto action against General Bajwa to explain his position? :slight_smile:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX8U5LE03UY

12

^^^ I have great respect for Aitzaz Ahsan, but I disagree that the cases against Nawaz Sharif and Marriam were open-and-shut cases. Had that been the case, Nawaz Sharif would not have been disqualified over hyper-technical grounds of unreceived income. Pervaiz Musharraf had also tried but failed. Marriam was sentenced over similar flimsy grounds. More importantly, such cases would have taken centuries to reach a conclusion but judiciary got super-charged and gave verdict in mere months. Confession of the judge Arshad Malik that he was pressurized with some compromising videos, testimony of Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui, affidavit of Rana Shamim should be more than enough to dismiss the sentences.

There is a subtle but important difference. Unlike anyone else, IK repeatedly praised the involvement of establishment in politics while in power, and immediately after getting out of power still kept openly tried to win back the establishment, and dissed establishment’s neutral stance after he was sure that he won’t get any support. PML-N and PPP have become far more mature, they were never ousted due to incompetence. They have learned the hard way to not to try to step out of the ring of fire. Lately, when PPP and PML-N have been in power, they have avoided political victimization of opposition. Following is a great speech by PML-N’s Mushahid Ullah in senate when PTI was enjoying full support of establishment. Mushahid Ullah had predicted what will happen to PTI: